Maurice Riordan

Who is Maurice Riordan?

Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator, and editor. Born in Lisgoold, County Cork, Riordan has published three collections of poetry: A Word from the Loki, a largely London-based collection which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Floods which took a more millennial tone, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; and The Holy Land which contains a sequence of Idylls or prose poems and returns to Riordan's Irish roots more directly than his earlier work. It received the Michael Hartnett Award.

He is a prolific editor and his anthologies include A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science, a collaboration with Jon Turney, an anthology of ecological poems Wild Reckoning edited with John Burnside, and Dark Matter edited with astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. He has also edited a selection of poems by Hart Crane in Faber's 'Poet to Poet' series.

He has translated the work of Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud as Confidential Reports. In the same year he released a collection for children entitled The Moon Has Written You a Poem, adapted from the Portuguese of José Letria.